By maryt
I hate numbers because I hate math. Unsurprisingly, this mentality led me to blindly hate everything that has to do with numbers. So writing about forex (short for “foreign exchange”) is a challenge because this topic is the embodiment of numbers, formulas, charts, and everything that I simply hate. In fact, until this post, most of what I knew of forex and trading came from Hollywood films such as “Trading Places” (1983) and “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (2010).
But nevertheless, I found myself reading through websites like Forexmagnates and ForexMinute to learn more about how forex works and which forex affiliate programs would give me the biggest commissions for my effort.
There’s a certain glamor or allure to the financial industry, and that includes forex — wouldn’t you like to know if Forex is a hot niche for affiliates? Please keep reading. I promise you that I have a lot of new info to cover with this niche.
What is Forex?
The industry defined.
Wikipedia says:
“The foreign exchange market (forex, FX, or currency market) is a global decentralized market for the trading of currencies. This includes all aspects of buying, selling and exchanging currencies at current or determined prices. In terms of volume of trading, it is by far the largest market in the world.”
OK, so right away we can tell that the niche is popular. It’s been around a long time, too: the forex industry was born way back when the world relied on silver and gold as means of payment. But the world keeps changing all the time and so does the way we buy, sell and trade all kinds of goods. Today, the buy-sell-trade process has become more accessible, accurate, organized. It’s a complex system now known as forex trading, where money literally never sleeps, because everyone can trade 24/7.
Popularity = Money?
Is there still money in the forex market, despite leaner times?
Let us take a look at some current reports on forex:
On November 30, 2015, Financial Times forecasted:
“Currency strategists drawing up their predictions for 2016 largely agree on some broad themes — the US dollar will get stronger, emerging market currencies will stay weak and China’s renminbi will depreciate gradually.”
“Market uncertainty about 2016 stems from the uncomfortable experiences of 2015 — the shocks of the Swiss franc being depegged and China’s renminbi devaluation, the choppy performance of the US economy and worries over deflation sapping global activity.”
Earlier this year, FT’s forecast about the market has materialized and it was backed up with several interesting data reported by Reuters:
“The days when close to $6 trillion changed hands on an average day may never return, industry observers say, as tighter bank regulation, the fading emerging market boom and secular slowdown in world growth and trade take their toll.”
“Data from CLS Bank, which offers the world’s largest multilateral cash settlement service, showed average daily volume in January was $4.8 trillion, down 9 percent from a year earlier and a far cry from the near $6 trillion peak.”
But despite this fallout, Google Trends still shows a slight, slow general uptick in interest of late, along with the usual dips and peaks:
Additionally, the social share data is pretty much in line with Google Trends data, with some very popular sites and pages.
Using Buzzsumo, we can see that out of the top 5 trending pages about Forex, the first top 4 are all covering basic information on Forex and trading.
While the industry has fallen from its peak, people are still interested in learning about forex. One huge reason behind this is simple: The forex market is very lucrative. People are enticed by its money-making potential, since anyone can get into trading, with minimal capital and any kind of schedule, because the forex market is open for trading 24 hours a day. This is a niche where everyone’s goal is to earn money, and by that, they mean earning huge sums of money from forex.
Keyword Research
How to do keyword research and spy on your competitor’s keywords.
For our NOTW posts, we always do the keyword research. We will do the same for forex, but this time, we will also be looking at the competitor’s target keywords.
Why are we doing this? If you are an avid reader of NOTW, you may have already learned the basics of keyword research. They are all the same. You can refer to our latest NOTW posts on keyword research here and here for reference.
This time, we take a different approach to our keyword research. We will be considering the keywords your competitors are already using, plus the keywords that we get from the basic keyword research. Consider this as a crash course in advanced keyword research using our very own AffiloTools.
First, we need to know who our competitors are for this niche. To find them, just use Google. Enter any keyword related to forex. For example, I typed in “forex trading” on Google, and it gave me 29 million results.
Big numbers like that indicate interest in the topic, but that’s not our concern here. Nor do you have to check all of the results. All that matters are the first 10 results, since these are the top websites ranking for the given keyword (in this case, “forex trading”).
NOTE: The top 10 results start below the ads. With every search term in Google, you can expect to see several ads placed just below the search bar, as you can see above.
For the term “forex trading,” we have 4 ads under the search bar. Below that, you can see the top websites ranking for our search phrase. Just select one or two competitor sites to start.
These are two sites that I picked on the search results: GCI Online Trading (gcitrading.com) and Investopedia (investopedia.com). These sites are perfect examples of what an affiliate forex site looks like.
IMPORTANT: I have skipped Wikipedia since this site is already (automatically) considered an authority …read more
Read more here:: Affiliate Marketing Blog
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